Jenny Erpenbeck’s book talks a lot about bodies, bodies with black skin and bodies with white skin, bodies with visible and invisible scars, bodies with a place to be and bodies in a vacuum, bodies with supposedly little time left and bodies with supposedly too much time, bodies in limbo outside of time, bodies with a history and bodies without a future. How the being of those bodies is shaped by something as abstract as “the law,” specifically the law that regards individuals fleeing brutal wars in Libya, Sudan, Niger, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, and Burkina Faso is what Richard, the protagonist of this fictional story based on real events, tries to understand. …

Richard understands: Dublin II allows all the European countries without a Mediterranean coastline to purchase the right not to have to listen to the stories of arriving refugees. In other words, so-called “asylum fraud” means one must tell a true story in a country where no one’s legally obligated to listen, much less do anything in response. And the soon-to-be-implemented fingerprint scanning system, he reads, will preclude all misunderstandings as to whether an individual belongs to a group that must be listened to or not.

I’ve spent part of this year reading through the work of Jon McGregor, whose latest novel, Reservoir 13, has met with a lot of acclaim here in Britain. It has even become one of those rare beasts longlisted or shortlisted for the more conservative literary prizes (the Booker, the Costa) as well as the Goldsmiths Prize for “innovative fiction.” Now, on the occasion of its publication in America, James Wood has offered an especially perceptive take on the new book in the context of McGregor’s body of work.

“McGregor’s first novel received a lot of excited attention,” writes Wood,

\but in comparison with his later work it seems showy; it glistens with anxious youthful effort. The sentences are self-consciously lyrical, but not quite brilliant enough to earn their inflation. There are moments of subtlety, but they have to be dug out of the style. And the book is uneasily poised on the lip of a conceit: the street, we learn, is being described just before a climactic and terrible moment, withheld until the end of the book.

That was exactly my impression when I read it over the summer. Thankfully, McGregor has improved with age, and Reservoir 13 is his best work to date, establishing certain continuities with his earlier novels even as it breaks with them in its effects. Continue reading →

I confess I’m a fan of Mary Oliver, but my reading of contemporary poetry isn’t informed enough to have made me aware, before today, that someone could admit such a thing “unashamedly.” That word appears in Ruth Franklin’s review of Oliver’s latest book, Devotions, when Franklin declares her affection for Oliver in the face of criticisms levelled against the poet. The review is titled “What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand,” and although, by the end of it, I don’t quite understand what it is that Oliver’s critics don’t understand, I think it does a good job of at least pointing to some of the things I like about Oliver’s work. Continue reading →

Who knows what to make of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Go, Went, Gone?

James Wood has written a deeply appreciative review in the New Yorker, calling the novel “magnificent” and counting “among its many virtues” the fact that “it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling ‘moving’ stories about people who are very different from us.” He basically reads the novel as a character study of its protagonist, Richard, insofar as Richard’s established character is impinged upon and mutated by his voluntary encounters with asylum seekers in Germany. He doesn’t really read the novel with an eye towards the political, moral, or aesthetic implications of Erpenbeck’s choice to take Richard as her protagonist, except to see Richard as a sort of device that buffers Erpenbeck from simply telling a “moving” story about one or more refugees.

Jonathan Dee, however, has an exceptionally perceptive take on the novel, which really amounts to a takedown of impeccable detail and nuance. “Richard goes to a town hall to discuss the refugee issue,” he writes: Continue reading →

It’s been thirty years since Bruce Chatwin published The Songlines. That’s the kind of anniversary that usually elicits either a renewed celebration and revival of a work or a fresh attempt to boot the author up the arse, a la Nicolas Rothwell upon the publication of Chatwin’s letters. Intriguingly, with consummate skill and nuance, Richard Cooke has taken a shot at doing both of those things simultaneously in a long reappraisal of The Songlines for the Australian magazine The Monthly. His essay is a model of what literary criticism can do when combined with cultural and biographical research, a deep sympathy for the writer’s intentions and accomplishments, an awareness for the writer’s shortcomings, and a keen eye for fine-grained textual details. What Cooke has essentially written is a paean to The Songlines as a remarkable, visionary book that was compromised from the outset by the limitations of its author’s vision, and that ended up offering a crippled representation of the very thing it aimed to praise. Continue reading →

Following the death of John Ashbery earlier this month, a number of eloquent, incisive memorial essays have been appearing on the web. Given Ashbery’s long history of publishing in the New Yorker, it’s no surprise that some of the best would come from others involved with that magazine. Here, for instance, is Ben Lerner, a great admirer of Ashbery and effectively his protégé:

The first time I met John (a decade ago), he thought I was someone else. This became slowly clear to me because he kept asking me questions about the poet Landis Everson, about whom I knew basically nothing. (It turned out that John thought I was the writer Ben Mazer, who edited Everson’s collected poems.) There was something appropriate about being misidentified by the poet who’d become my hero, in part because of the beautiful fungibility of his “you”: the way sometimes the poems address you, are alone in the room with a particular reader (yes, you), and sometimes address all possible yous, expand until we feel the mundane miracle of address as such — that there are other people, that there might be a common language.

Lerner’s remarks on the experience of reading Ashbery’s poems, which appear in his novel Leaving the Atocha Station and should rightly be attributed to his narrator Adam Gordon, have also been haunting me since Ashbery’s death: Continue reading →

Come to a place like this, shut your mouth and your mind and walk on the moor, walk in the wind and the sun, and you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing, that we walk through it, we breathe with it, we are its breath, that when we stand on a mountain overcome by the sunset and all that it brings, or fall to our knees in front of an altar in the presence of something greater than ourselves, then we are sensing the animal shift and turn beneath our feet.